Moral Realism

First published Mon Oct 3, 2005; substantive revision Tue Feb 3, 2015

Taken at face value, the claim that Nigel has a moral obligation to
keep his promise, like the claim that Nyx is a black cat, purports to
report a fact and is true if things are as the claim purports. Moral
realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be
taken at face value—moral claims do purport to report facts and
are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least
some moral claims actually are true. That much is the common and more
or less defining ground of moral realism (although some accounts of
moral realism see it as involving additional commitments, say to the
independence of the moral facts from human thought and practice, or to
those facts being objective in some specified way).

As a result, those who reject moral realism are usefully divided
into (i) those who think moral claims do not purport to report facts in
light of which they are true or false (noncognitivists) and (ii) those
who think that moral claims do carry this purport but deny that any
moral claims are actually true (error theorists).

It is worth noting that, while moral realists are united in their
cognitivism and in their rejection of error theories, they disagree
among themselves not only about which moral claims are actually true
but about what it is about the world that makes those claims true.
Moral realism is not a particular substantive moral view nor does it
carry a distinctive metaphysical commitment over and above the
commitment that comes with thinking moral claims can be true or false
and some are true. Still, much of the debate about moral realism
revolves around either what it takes for claims to be true or false at
all (with some arguing that moral claims do not have what it takes) or
what it would take specifically for moral claims to be true (with some
arguing that moral claims would require something the world does not
provide).

The debate between moral realists and anti-realists assumes, though,
that there is a shared object of inquiry—in this case, a range
of claims all involved are willing to recognize as moral
claims—about which two questions can be raised and answered: Do
these claims purport to report facts in light of which they are true
or false? Are some of them true? Moral realists answer
‘yes’ to both, non-cognitivists answer ‘no’ to
the first (and, by default, ‘no’ to the second) while
error theorists answer ‘yes’ to the first and
‘no’ to the second. (With the introduction of
“minimalism” about truth and facts, things become a bit
more complicated. See the section on semantics, below.) To note that
some other, non-moral, claims do not (or do) purport to report facts
or that none (or some) of them are true, is to change the
subject. That said, it is strikingly hard to nail down with any
accuracy just which claims count as moral and so are at issue in the
debate. For the most part, those concerned with whether moral realism
is true are forced to work back and forth between an intuitive grasp
of which claims are at issue and an articulate but controversial
account of what they have in common such that realism either is, or is
not, defensible about them.

By all accounts, moral realism can fairly claim to have common sense
and initial appearances on its side. That advantage, however, might easily
outweighed; there are a number of powerful arguments for
holding that it is a mistake to think of moral claims as true.

Perhaps the longest standing argument is found in the extent and
depth of moral disagreement. The mere fact of disagreement does not
raise a challenge for moral realism. Disagreement is to be found in
virtually any area, even where no one doubts that the claims at stake
purport to report facts and everyone grants that some claims are
true.

But disagreements differ and many believe that the sort of
disagreements one finds when it comes to morality are best explained by
supposing one of two things: (i) that moral claims are not actually in
the business of reporting facts, but are rather our way of expressing
emotions, or of controlling others’ behavior, or, at least, of
taking a stand for and against certain things or (ii) that moral claims
are in the business of reporting facts, but the required facts just are
not to be found.

Taking the first line, many note that people differ in their
emotions, attitudes and interests and then argue that moral
disagreements simply reflect the fact that the moral claims people
embrace are (despite appearances) really devices for expressing or
serving their different emotions, attitudes, and interests.

Taking the second line, others note that claims can genuinely
purport to report facts and yet utterly fail (consider claims about
phlogiston or astrological forces or some mythical figure that others
believed existed) and then argue that moral disagreements take the form
they do because the facts that would be required to give them some
order and direction are not to be found.

On either view, the distinctive nature of moral disagreement is seen
as well explained by the supposition that moral realism is false,
either because cognitivism is false or because an error theory is
true.

Interestingly, the two lines of argument are not really compatible.
If one thinks that moral claims do not even purport to report facts,
one cannot intelligibly hold that the facts such claims purport to
report do not exist. Nonetheless, in important ways, the considerations
each mobilizes might be used to support the other. For instance,
someone defending an error theory might point to the ways in which
moral claims are used to express or serve peoples’ emotions,
attitudes, and interests, to explain why people keep arguing as they do
despite there being no moral facts. And someone defending
noncognitivism might point to the practical utility of talking as if
there were moral facts to explain why moral claims seem to purport to
report facts even though they do not.

Moreover, almost surely each of these views is getting at something
that is importantly right about some people and their use of what
appear to be moral claims. No one doubts that often peoples’
moral claims do express their emotions, attitudes, and do serve their
interests and it is reasonable to suspect that at least some people
have in mind as moral facts a kind of fact we have reason to think does
not exist.

Moral realists are committed to holding, though, that to whatever
extent moral claims might have other uses and might be made by people
with indefensible accounts of moral facts, some moral claims, properly
understood, are actually true. To counter the arguments that appeal to
the nature of moral disagreement, moral realists need to show that the
disagreements are actually compatible with their commitments.

An attractive first step is to note, as was done above, that mere
disagreement is no indictment. Indeed, to see the differences among
people as disagreements—rather than as mere differences—it seems
as if one needs to hold that they are making claims that contradict one
another and this seems to require that each side see the other as
making a false claim. To the extent there is moral disagreement and not
merely difference, moral realists argue, we need at least to reject
noncognitivism (even as we acknowledge that the views people embrace
might be heavily influenced by their emotions, attitudes, and
interests). While this is plausible, noncognitivists can and have
replied by distinguishing cognitive disagreement from other sorts of
disagreement and arguing that moral disagreements are of a sort that does
not require cognitivism. Realists cannot simply dismiss this
possibility, though they can legitimately challenge noncognitivists to
make good sense of how moral arguments and disagreements are carried on
without surreptitiously appealing to the participants seeing their
claims as purporting to report facts.

In any case, even if the nature of disagreements lends some
plausibility to cognitivism, moral realists need also to respond to the
error theorist's contention that the arguments and disagreements all
rest on some false supposition to the effect that there are actually
facts of the sort there would have to be for some of the claims to be
true. And, however moral realists respond, they need to avoid doing so
in a way that then makes a mystery of the widespread moral disagreement
(or at least difference) that all acknowledge.

Some moral realists argue that the disagreements, widespread as they
are, do not go very deep—that to a significant degree moral
disagreements play out against the background of shared fundamental
principles with the differences of opinion regularly being traceable to
disagreements about the nonmoral facts that matter in light of the
moral principles. On their view, the explanation of moral disagreements
will be of a piece with whatever turns out to be a good explanation of
the various nonmoral disagreements people find themselves in.

Other moral realists, though, see the disagreements as sometimes
fundamental. On their view, while moral disagreements might in some
cases be traceable to disagreements about nonmoral matters of fact,
this will not always be true. Still, they deny the anti-realist's
contention that the disagreements that remain are well explained by
noncognitivism or by an error theory Instead, they regularly offer
some other explanation of the disagreements. They point out, for
example, that many of the disagreements can be traced to the
distorting effects of the emotions, attitudes, and interests that are
inevitably bound up with moral issues. Or they argue that what appear
to be disagreements are really cases in which the people are talking
past each other, each making claims that might well be true once the
claims are properly understood (Harman 1975, Wong 1984). And they
often combine these explanatory strategies holding that the full range
of moral disagreements are well explained by some balanced appeal to
all of the considerations just mentioned, treating some disagreements
as not fundamentally moral, others as a reflection of the distorting
effects of emotion and interest, and still others as being due to
insufficiently subtle understandings of what people are actually
claiming. If some combination of these explanations works, then the
moral realist is on firm ground in holding that the existence of moral
disagreements, such as they are, is not an argument against moral
realism. Of course, if no such explanation works, then an appeal
either to noncognitivism or an error theory (i.e. to some form of
anti-realism) may be the best alternative.

Putting aside the arguments that appeal to moral disagreement, a
significant motivation for anti-realism about morality is found in worries
about the metaphysics of moral realism and especially worries about whether
moral realism might be reconciled with (what has come to be called)
naturalism. It is hard, to say the least, to define naturalism in a
clear way. Yet the underlying idea is fairly easy to convey. According
to naturalism, the only facts we should believe in are those
countenanced by, or at least compatible with, the results of science.
To find, of some putative fact, that its existence is neither
established by, nor even compatible with science, is to discover, as
naturalism would have it, that there is no such fact. If moral realism
requires facts that are incompatible with science (as many think it
does) that alone would constitute a formidable argument against it.

Noncognitivists and error theorists alike have no trouble respecting
naturalism while offering their respective accounts of moral claims. In
both cases, their accounts appeal to nothing not already embraced by
naturalism. Of course noncognitivists and error theories disagree in
crucial ways about the nature of moral thought, and noncognitivists and
error theorists disagree among themselves too about which versions of
their preferred accounts are better. But they all are, from the point
of view of naturalism, on safe ground.

Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to
sustain their accounts without appealing, in the end, to putative facts
that fly in the face of naturalism. This standard view can be traced to
a powerful and influential argument offered by G.E. Moore (1903). As
Moore saw things, being a naturalist about morality required thinking
that moral terms could be defined correctly using terms that refer to
natural properties. Thus one might define ‘good’ as
‘pleasant’, thus securing naturalistic credentials for
value (so long as pleasure was a natural property) or one might define
‘good’ as ‘satisfies a desire we desire to
have’ or as ‘conforms to the rules in force in our
society’ or ‘promotes the species.’ Any one of these
proposed definitions, if true, would establish that the facts required
to make claims about what is good true or false were compatible with
naturalism. Yet, Moore argued, no such definition is true.
Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive.
For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was
on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the
naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really)
good.

Consider someone who held not merely that pleasure was something good
but (as a definition would have it) that pleasure was
goodness—that they were one and the same property. According to
that person, in claiming that something is pleasant one is claiming
that it is good, and vice versa. In that case, though, it
would not make sense for people to acknowledge that something is
pleasant and then wonder, nonetheless, whether it was good. That would
be like acknowledging that something is a triangle and then wondering,
nonetheless, whether it has three sides. Yet, Moore maintained, the
two cases are not alike. A person who wonders whether a triangle has
three sides shows he does not understand what it is to be a
triangle. His competence with the terms in question is revealed to be
inadequate. In contrast, Moore observed, for any natural property
whatsoever it was always an open question whether things that had that
natural property were good. A person who raised that question did not
thereby reveal himself not to be competent with the terms in
question. What this shows, Moore argued, was that moral terms did not
refer to natural properties and so a proper account of moral claims
would have to recognize that they purport to report non-natural
facts.

Now of course moral realists can consistently acknowledge this and
then argue against naturalism—perhaps, at least in part, on the
grounds that naturalism is incompatible with acknowledging moral facts. This
was, in fact, Moore’s position. Yet one then has the burden of
explaining how moral facts are related to natural facts and the burden
of explaining how we might manage to learn of these non-natural facts.
A good deal of the work that has been done defending moral realism is
devoted either to meeting these burdens or to showing that they do not
pose a special problem just for morality. Moral realists of this sort
allow that moral facts are not natural facts, and moral knowledge is
not simply of a piece with scientific knowledge, even as they defend
the idea that there are moral facts and (at least in principle) moral
knowledge. They thus reject the idea that science is the measure and
test of all things (Shafer-Landau 2003, Parfit 2011, Scanlon 2014).

Impressed by the plausibility of naturalism, though, many moral
realists have tried, in one way or another, to show that the moral
facts they are committed to are either themselves natural facts or are
at least appropriately compatible with such facts (Boyd 1988, Brink
1989, Railton 1986). If they are right, then naturalism poses no
special threat to moral realism.

For a long time, people thought that Moore’s Open Question
Argument (as it has come to be called) established that no version of
moral naturalism was defensible. However, recent developments in the
philosophy of language and metaphysics have raised concerns about
Moore’s argument. Of special concern is the fact that the
argument seems to rule out inappropriately the possibility of
establishing—on grounds other than semantic analysis—that
two terms actually refer to the same property, substance, or
entity.

The problem becomes clear if one thinks of, for instance, the claim
that water is H2O. That water is H2O cannot be
discovered simply by appreciating the meanings of the terms involved,
so if a person were to wonder of some water whether it is really
H2O he would not thereby be revealing some incompetence
with the terms in question. His question would be, in the relevant
way, an Open Question, even if, in fact, water is
H2O. Similarly, some moral realists argue that value might,
in fact, be properly identified with, say, what satisfies desires we
desire to have (to take one proposal Moore considered) even though
this cannot be discovered simply by appreciating the meanings of the
terms involved. As a result, a person might intelligibly wonder
whether something that satisfied a desire she desired to have was
actually good. The question might be, in the relevant way, an Open
Question, even if, in fact, value is whatever satisfies a desire we
desire to have. Of course the point here is not that one or another
such proposal is true, but that the openness of the Open Question is
not good grounds for supposing such proposals could not be true.

Pursing a different response to Moore's Open Question Argument, others
have defended the possibility of a successful semantic analysis
reducing moral claims to claims expressible in entirely naturalistic
terms (Jackson 1998, Finlay 2014). Accordingly, they argue that the
openness Moore points to, such as it is, is compatible with a correct
semantic analysis—albeit not obvious—showing that
moral facts are nothing over and above natural facts.

Once the Open Question is sidelined as being, at least, not
decisive, room is left for thinking a correct account of the moral
facts might identify them as natural facts. Just which facts those
might be, and what arguments one might offer for one account rather
than another, remains open, but the idea that we can know ahead of time
that there are no good arguments for such an account is no longer
widely accepted.

Nonetheless, realists and anti-realists alike are usually inclined
to hold that Moore’s Open Question Argument is getting at
something important—some feature of moral claims that makes
them not well captured by nonmoral claims.

According to some, that ‘something important’ is that
moral claims are essentially bound up with motivation in a way that
nonmoral claims are not (Ayer 1936, Stevenson 1937, Gibbard 1990,
Blackburn 1993). Exactly what the connection to motivation is supposed
to be is itself controversial, but one common proposal (motivation
internalism) is that a person counts as sincerely making a moral claim
only if she is motivated appropriately. To think of something that it
is good, for instance, goes with being, other things equal, in favor of
it in ways that would provide some motivation (not necessarily
decisive) to promote, produce, preserve or in other ways support it. If
someone utterly lacks such motivations and yet claims nonetheless that
she thinks the thing in question is good, there is reason, people note,
to suspect either that she is being disingenuous or that she does not
understand what she is saying. This marks a real contrast with nonmoral
claims since the fact that a person makes some such claim sincerely
seems never to entail anything in particular about her motivations.
Whether she is attracted by, repelled by, or simply indifferent to some
color is irrelevant to whether her claim that things have that color
are sincere and well understood by her.

Noncognitivists often appeal to this apparent contrast to argue that
moral claims have this necessary connection to motivation precisely
because they do not express beliefs (that might be true or false) but
instead express motivational states of desire, approval, or commitment
(that might be satisfied or frustrated but are neither true nor false).
Nonmoral claims, they maintain, commonly express beliefs and for that
reason are rightly seen as purporting to report facts and as being
evaluable as true or false. Yet, because beliefs alone are
motivationally inert, the fact that someone is sincerely making such a
claim (that is, is expressing something she actually believes) is
compatible with her having any sort of motivation, or none at all. In
contrast, claims that commonly express desires, preferences, and
commitments do not purport to report facts and are not evaluable as
true or false. Yet, because these are all motivationally loaded, the
fact that someone sincerely makes such a claim (that is, is expressing
something she actually feels) is incompatible with her failing to have
the corresponding motivations. As soon as the contrast is in place,
noncognitivists argue, we can well explain the motivational force of
sincere moral claims and explain too the insight behind Moore’s
Open Question Argument, by seeing moral claims as not beliefs but
(perhaps a distinctive kind of) desire, preference, or commitment.

Some moral realists respond to this line of argument by rejecting
the idea that beliefs are all motivationally inert (Platts 1979).
According to them moral beliefs stand as a counter example. But it is
not the only apparent counter example. Consider, for instance, first
person claims concerning the prospect of pain. If a person claimed that
an experience would be painful and yet had no motivation whatsoever,
other things equal, to resist, oppose, or in some way avoid that
experience, there would be reason to suspect either that she is being
disingenuous or that she does not understand what she is saying. That,
though, is no reason to think a sincere claim that some experience
would be painful does not express a belief, purport to report a fact,
and open itself to evaluation as true or false. This all suggests,
these realists argue, that moral claims might well carry motivational
implications, and that might be the insight behind Moore’s Open
Question Argument, even though those claims express beliefs and, as a
result, purport to report facts and can be evaluated as true or
false.

Other moral realists reject the idea that moral claims are as
tightly bound up with motivation as the noncognitivist argument
supposes. They point out that, while an absence of appropriate
motivation would raise questions, there might be answers. The person
making the claims might be so depressed or so weak-willed or so evil,
that she remains utterly unmoved even when she sincerely thinks action
would secure something valuable. To suppose this is not possible is to
beg the question against those who would grant that beliefs are
motivationally inert while holding that moral claims express
beliefs.

Those that take this line can, and often do, go on to argue
nonetheless both (i) that there is a distinctive connection between
moral claims and action and (ii) that the connection helps to explain
the insight behind Moore’s Open Question Argument. However, they
maintain, the distinctive connection is either itself a normative
connection between the claims and motivation or else it is a conceptual
connection between the claims (or their truth) and which actions a
person has reason to perform (Smith 1994). On the first suggestion, a
person might well fail to be motivated appropriately by the moral
claims she sincerely embraces, but in failing to be appropriately
motivated she would thereby count as irrational. On the second
suggestion, again a person might well fail to be motivated
appropriately by the moral claims she sincerely embraces, but either
the fact that she sincerely embraces the claims or the truth of the
claims she embraces (if they are true) provide reasons for her to act
in certain ways. All of these views involves rejecting motivational
internalism even as they each maintain that there is a conceptual
connection of some sort between moral claims (or their truth) and
action (or the motivation to act). (The resulting views are often
characterized as versions of reason internalism.) Nonmoral claims alone
never imply anything in particular about what people have reason to do
or refrain from doing, but moral claims, in contrast, do have such
implications, they argue. On this view, there is a necessary connection
between moral claims and action, but it is between these claims (or
their truth) and reason (or rationality), and is not such that
sincerely embracing a moral claim guarantees appropriate
motivation.

None of this is to defend, as realists must, the idea that some of
the claims are actually true. But it does suggest that moral realists
can acknowledge a necessary connection between moral claims and action
without abandoning the cognitivism that is central to their
position.

Some error theorists do argue that combining cognitivism with
motivational internalism results in an untenable position (Mackie
1977). According to them, the moral facts that would make motivating
beliefs true would themselves have to be, in some way, intrinsically
motivating states of the world. And, they add, there is no reason to
think there are such states. Yet if the motivational internalism one
embraces for moral claims has a parallel for pain claims, then this
argument must be wrong (assuming it is true of some experiences that
they are painful). Either motivational internalism does not require
intrinsically motivating states of the world in order for the relevant
claims to be true or else we have independent reason (provided by our
awareness of pain) to think there are such states. While there may well
be reason to think there are no moral facts, this argument does not
provide it.

Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there are moral facts.
Suppose even that the moral facts are properly thought of as at least
compatible with science. One thing Moore’s Open Question
Argument still seems to show is that no appeal to natural facts
discovered by scientific method would establish that the moral facts
are one way rather than another. That something is pleasant, or
useful, or satisfies someone’s preference, is perfectly
compatible with thinking that it is neither good nor right nor worth
doing. The mere fact that moral facts might be compatible with natural
facts does nothing to support the idea that we could learn about the
moral facts. David Hume seems to have been, in effect, pressing this
point long before Moore, when he argued that no moral conclusion
follows non-problematically from nonmoral premises (Hume 1739). No
“ought,” he pointed out, followed from an
“is”—without the help of another (presupposed)
“ought.” More generally, there is no valid inference from
nonmoral premises to moral conclusions unless one relies, at least
surreptitiously, on a moral premise. If, then, all that science can
establish is what “is” and not what ought to be, science
cannot alone establish moral conclusions.

But from where, then, can we get the moral premises needed? Of
course no answer is to be found in a claim that certain norms are in
force or that a powerful being commanded something since, in both
cases, nothing about what ought to be done follows from these claims
without assuming some further moral claim (e.g. that one ought to obey
the norms in force or that one owes allegiance to the powerful being).
If at least some fundamental moral principles were self-evident, or
analytic truths, or at least reasonably thought to enjoy widespread
consensus or to be such that eventually all would converge on those
principles, there might be some plausible candidates. Yet the few
principles that might be candidates—one ought to treat people with
respect or one ought to promote human welfare or, other things equal,
pleasure is good—are all either so abstract or inspecific in
their implications that they could hardly alone work to justify the
full range of moral claims people are inclined to make.

These considerations highlight a crucial difficulty moral realists
face even if one grants the existence of moral facts: they need some
account of how we might justify our moral claims. Otherwise, whatever
the moral facts are, we would have reasonable grounds for worrying that
what we count as evidence for any particular claim is no evidence at
all.

In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge
posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other
claims we take ourselves to be justified in making. For instance, just
as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral
conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone
entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological
premises will alone entail a biological conclusion. In each case the
premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously,
psychological or biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet
no one supposes that this means we can never justify claims concerning
psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of course does
not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral
claims we do. But they do show that granting the inferential gap
between nonmoral claims and moral claims does not establish that we can
have no evidence for the moral claims. And they refocus the challenge
facing moral realists. Under what conditions, and why, are
psychological and biological claims reasonably thought justified? Might
similar conditions and considerations hold for moral claims?

At one time, philosophers thought there was a quick and easy answer to
these questions, an answer that immediately discredited moral
claims. That answer was that in psychology and biology our
justifications can and do ultimately ground out in empirical
observations, whereas nothing of the kind is available for moral
theory. If true, this would explain in a sharp way why psychology and
biology might have a real claim on our opinions while morality and
alchemy and various crackpot theories do not. The former can be tested
against experience and pass the test, while the latter, while
testable, can be seen to fail utterly.

Moral realists have three sorts of reply to the epistemic challenge
they face. One is to argue that a proper appreciation of the ways in
which all observation is theory laden leaves no real contrast between
the observations that support psychology and biology and those that are
appealed to supporting moral theories. As proponents of this view would
have it, the process of justifying various scientific theories, which
involves moving back and forth between particular specific claims and
more general principles seeking a mutually supporting system, is
matched step for step by when people develop and defend moral theories.
In both cases specific judgments (concerning observations or the
badness of a certain act, for instance) are tentatively accepted and an
attempt is made to make sense of them by appeal to more general
principles that explain the judgments. When the more general principles
are available the specific judgments are taken as evidence for the
principles and the principles reciprocate by helping to justify the
thought that the specific judgments are accurate. But if no general
principles are available the specific judgments are called into
question and the suspicion is rightly raised that they might be
illusory or misleading. Whether they are taken to be warranted is
decided in large part, and rightly, by appealing to other principles
that so far have themselves found support in their fit with still other
specific judgments. The process is of necessity tentative and piecemeal
but it is, many argue, nonetheless no different in science than in
morality. All of this is, of course, compatible with thinking the
process might end in failure—alchemy and crackpot theories are
prime examples of how the attempt to sustain a systematic and mutually
supporting set of beliefs can fail. But absent special arguments that
morality fails in the way they do, morality no less than psychology and
biology can claim that experience may well provide confirmation for our
moral claims (Sayre-McCord 1996).

Some moral realists, particularists, reject the general picture of
systematic justification just described and yet argue that, when it
comes to the role of observation, moral claims are nonetheless actually
on a par with non-moral claims (Dancy 1993). According to them, our
justification for our particular nonmoral observations depends not at
all on our having any sort of articulatable general grounds to offer
as support. To suppose otherwise is to succumb to a misguided picture
of when and why people are justified in believing as they do
concerning what they observe. The situation is exactly the same,
particularists maintain, with our moral claims. Here too someone can
be perfectly justified in claiming, for instance, that some particular
action was wrong or that some response was obligatory, without having
articulatable general ground to offer as support. Such moral claims
might, of course, still prove to be mistaken, but then the same is
true of what people take themselves to have seen.

Another realist reply to the epistemic challenge is to argue that
mathematics and logic, not science, are the right models of moral
theory (Scanlon 2014). Neither mathematics nor logic, some maintain, rely on
experience for their confirmation. They are, instead, supportable a
priori by appeal to the nature of the concepts they involve. On
this view, a sound defense of the principles we need to ground moral
arguments can be found in a suitably subtle and careful bit of
conceptual analysis. In light of Moore’s Open Question Argument,
those who advocate an epistemology of conceptual analysis acknowledge
that the correct analysis, whatever it is, is likely not at all
obvious. And, they point out, this means that people who are genuinely
competent with the relevant concepts might themselves not recognize the
correct analysis as correct (Jackson 1998). Nonetheless, the analysis might be
correct. If there is some such analysis to be had, and if it is rich
enough to provide the sort of substantive principles needed to
underwrite our various particular judgments, realism will have met well
its epistemic burden. Of course putting things this way assumes we have
a good epistemology of conceptual analysis, which might well be called
into question. But worries about conceptual analysis are not specific
to morality. And if they prove decisive, then those worries leave
mathematics and logic, no less than morals, in need of some grounding
or other. Whatever might be advanced on behalf of mathematics and
logic, many think, should work as well for morality.

Still another reply, compatible with the first two but relying
specifically on neither, shifts attention from science and from
mathematics and logic, to epistemology itself. To think of any set of
considerations that they justify some conclusion is to make a claim
concerning the value (albeit the epistemic as opposed to moral value)
of a conclusion. To hold of science, or mathematics, or logic, that
there is a difference between good evidence or good arguments and bad
ones is again to commit oneself evaluatively. This raises an obvious
question: under what conditions, and why, are epistemic claims
reasonably thought justified? Whatever answer one might begin to offer
will immediately provide a model for an answer to the parallel question
raised about moral judgments. There is no guarantee, of course, that
our moral judgments will then end up being justified. The epistemic
standards epistemology meets might well not be met by moral theory. But
there is good reason to think the kinds of consideration that are
appropriate to judging epistemic principles will be appropriate too
when it comes to judging other normative principles, including those
that we might recognize as moral. This means that any quick dismissal
of moral theory as obviously not the sort of thing that could really be
justified are almost surely too quick.

Moral realists have here been characterized as those who hold that
moral claims purport to report facts, that they are evaluable as true
or false in light of whether the facts are as the claims purport, and
that at least some such claims are actually true. Many have thought
there are good reasons—even decisive reasons—for
rejecting moral realism so conceived.

Yet, with the development of (what has come to be called) minimalism
about talk of truth and fact, it might seem that this characterization
makes being a moral realist easier than it should be. As minimalism
would have it, saying that some claim is true is just a way of
(re-)asserting the claim and carries no commitment beyond that
expressed by the original claim. Thus, if one is willing to claim that
“murdering innocent children for fun is wrong” one can
comfortably claim as well that that “murdering innocent children
for fun is wrong is true” without thereby taking on any
additional metaphysical baggage. Since even noncognitivists would
presumably be willing to claim that “murdering innocent children
for fun is wrong,” they can acknowledge that the claim is true
too and it would be a mistake to see that addition as any sort of
renunciation of their noncognitivism. Having said that “it is
true that murdering innocent children for fun is wrong,” it
seems similarly innocuous for the non-cognitivists to grant that it is
a fact. After all, they can argue, to say of some claim that what it
says is a fact is itself just a way of (re-)asserting the claim and it
too carries no commitment beyond that expressed by the original
claim. Grammar alone, it seems, renders talk of truth and fact
appropriate and does so without incurring the sort of metaphysical
commitments that are rightly associated with genuine realism (see
Gibbard 2003, Dreier 2005).

Putting things this way, though, is misleading. It involves supposing
that the noncognitivist has somehow made out what her position comes
to without appealing to a contrast between, on the one hand, those
claims that are properly seen as truth-evaluable and, on the other
hand, those that are not. Traditional noncognitivism embrace this
contrast and so traditional noncognitivists are able to argue
intelligibly that moral claims are among those for which truth is
genuinely not at issue. They often, against the background of the
contrast, go on to explain why moral claims nonetheless mimic so well
claims that might actually be true and why we might even talk of them
being “true” in a sense (albeit not in the sense in which
claims properly understood as cognitive might be true). If, though,
the contrast cannot be drawn in terms of whether the claims are
truth-evaluable, the noncognitivist needs to offer an alternative
account of what marks the difference between the claims concerning
which one should be a noncognitivist and those concerning which one
should be a cognitivist. Absent such a contrast, the noncognitivists
have no distinctive thesis.

Error theorists also can find no special comfort in minimalism about
truth and fact. After all, to defend their view, error theorists need
to advance grounds for thinking that, while moral claims are
truth-evaluable, none of them are actually true. This requires
resisting the minimalist urge to make truth so cheap that any sort of
claim can have it. That is not to say that an error theorist cannot be
a minimalist about truth and fact. But it is to say that the
minimalism does not make her position easier (and it may actually make
her position more difficult) to sustain.

Minimalism is, then, no panacea for moral anti-realists. But it is
not poison for them either. Although minimalism undermines the
standard way in which anti-realists mark out their distinctive
territory, there is still room for them to defend some alternative
grounds for drawing the contrast between the areas about which one is
a realist and those about which one is an anti-realist. For instance,
one might argue that to be a realist about some area (morality or
whatever) is to hold that the properties distinctive to that area (in
this case moral properties) figure in some fundamental way in our
explanations. To be an anti-realist, on this view, is to hold that
such properties do not so figure. Drawing the contrast in this way
would allow an anti-realist still to acknowledge that the properties
exist (albeit not as fundamental explainers) and that claims ascribing
them are sometimes true. But it is unclear whether the main issues
that divide those who consider themselves realists from their
opponents are best seen as being about whether moral properties
qualify as fundamental explainers. Alternatively, one might argue
that to be a realist about some area is to hold that the truths
expressed by the relevant claims are not mind-dependent. And, the
suggestion would be, to be an anti-realist is to think that if there
are such truths, they are mind-dependent. This way of drawing the
contrast risks ruling out as impossible realism about psychology,
which seems draconian. And it would immediately count as anti-realist
those metaethical views that treat moral facts as response dependent
or in other ways dependent upon human thought and practice. So,
again, it is unclear whether this contrast lines up properly with the
main issues that have divided realists from
anti-realists. Nonetheless, one might rely on either explanation or
mind-independence to mark an important contrast between various
metaethical views. Paying attention to the stand particular views take
on explanation and mind-independence inevitably helps to keep them in
focus and works to mark important questions.

Whatever one thinks of minimalism, of the importance of explanation, and
of mind-independence, moral realism travels with the burden of making
sense of the semantics of moral terms in a way that will support
seeing claims that use them as genuinely truth-evaluable. Various
features of the way in which people rely on such claims in their
thought and talk support the idea that they are. At the same time,
though, some aspects of the ways in which children acquire moral terms
and the ways in which those terms are bound up with various emotions
pull against seeing the terms as simply on a par with nonmoral
terms. Working through the ways in which moral claims differ from, as
well as the ways in which they are the same as, other claims that
people make is essential to getting a full understanding of our moral
thought and practice. Whether such a full understanding will involve
seeing us as having moral beliefs (and not just moral reactions) that
might be true, is not at all clear. Perhaps even less clear is whether
and why we might reasonably hold that some of those beliefs are
actually true. Yet it is pretty clear that people do generally regard
their moral claims, and the moral claims of others, as purporting to
report facts, and to the extent they themselves sincerely advance such
claims they seem to be regarding at least some such claims as actually
true. The burden is on the anti-realists about morality to argue that
that this involves a mistake of some sort.